I like to think Crust is a transportation tycoon game pretending to be a colony sim pretending to be an automation game, and it was noted back in the Kickstarter Alpha that this game wasn't ready for Early Access, but they cultivated a cult of personality on their Discord and shut that discussion down right quick. Ignored some other obvious things the players brought up months ago too. Disappeared the Steam thread I mentioned a fair number of things in just to make the point that they don't care and didn't want people to know their game wasn't ready.

For instance, people complained about the research queue being needlessly restrictive, so they hid the techs down the tree you couldn't research yet, which everyone hated more and recently got reverted somewhat. The game saves progress on research but uses 3 different types of points, so to keep research going, you sometimes have to cancel a tech and select another one. They designed the UI to force you to fiddle with the UI as part of the "gameplay".

And you can't feed your colonists with the food tech because the fridge item the food goes in isn't unlocked until a later tech because they screwed up their own tech tree and nobody thought to fix this months down the road. Think about that.

It's buggy, it's basic, and you develop a codependent relationship with the 4X speed button because most of the time you're waiting for resources to come in with no ability to ramp up production for a whole lot of reasons. You'll also be surprised how few buildings you get to build for long stretches of time.

The worst part is it's not even a proper automation game, which is why I call it a transportation tycoon game. Those transport belts may as well be roads from a colony sim for all it matters since you can barely configure them. The real crux is all your automation tools take credits to build - you can't wire a building into the grid or hook up belts without cash, and the only way to get cash is via the trade and contracts system, which can't be automated and is still not well balanced to the early game. Think hundreds if not thousands of resources sent into the void just so you can get credits to lay down that belt for the new line that'll up your production by 5-10 items a minute. Getting the market to wobble into your favor or waiting for a proper contract to drop that you can actually do and won't take all the resources you're saving for building is the other reason you'll be clinging to the 4X speed button.

Game is padded as hell. Yeah, you can enjoy it as a slow burn transportation game, but Factorio this is not. Not even close.

I haven't even seen anything to make me think it's a good colony sim either. Try turning off the oxygen generation in an empty room. I bet the 02 still depletes even though nothing in the room uses 02, and then colonists act like robots for all their cards pretend they have a personality. Yeah, it's that sort of colony sim.

Project is just way too ambitious for what they're coding here, and you can tell that at first glance because robots have all sorts of weird behaviors like excavating and picking up regolith by nearest to the cargo elevator rather than anything sensible or expected, which wastes more of your time.

The 4X button is your only friend here. Hell, I'd fire your Vice Director, Alice, ten minutes into the campaign for gross unprofessionalism, which doesn't surprise me given how VEOM Studio has behaved.

Yes and No. At this stage, more towards "no".

So many things are going right for this game - UI is absolutely made by someone who understands UI/UX, (early) introductory part really gives some flesh to otherwise OCD simulator and soundtrack is alone worth the asking price.

But! But...

Balance is godawful. Early game forces you to slap down factories in limited space, yet nobody plays those games to build a slap-n-dash messy base. Research and rare components you could use to experiment or wait the story out a bit are locked, and even slight attempt at trying to gain
some time and plan everything out properly means pretty much a soft lock: either components run out, or colonists you're supposed to rescue, die, or whatever. Plus, there's timed quests which just screw you over.

My colonists died before I could find them (and game never told me where to look), and even though I managed to build living space for them, there were no colonists and no way to get any. And that's... that?!

Then there's contracts who ALL ask for WAY MORE than my barely functional, tutorial-forced base produces, and are clearly meant for some sort of ultra-skilled player who'd have fifty factories down by then. While I'm trying to figure out why refineries have slag INTAKE conveyor on one side, making already messy system even messier, and why the hell to begin with? How am supposed to crap out 50 titanium plates during this, I don't know. Or somebody just slapped random numbers there and didn't think about it. Similar games like Rimworld are really elegant about this, tracking base wealth and player progress and such. Not The Crust. It's not that much of a skill issue, either. I've played colony sims as long as they've existed.

The exploration is more or less pointless, since expedition center is behind extremely high wealth curve, so while you can explore entire moon, you can't do much at anywhere without the center. And by the time/wealth you have one, the rewards you'd get feel already meager and pointless.

What should be a game of planning and generally chilling, while marveling at your handiwork, instead keeps constantly rushing and pushing you. Which is incredibly annoying and often, unfair.

Speaking of unfairness, there's some terrible design decisions. For example, game asks you to build a room and gives you 90 days to do it. Except that it doesn't want you to just build a room, but research entire social tree, along with ten more buildings, set it all up, get rare components to do it all, so on. But in the beginning, you just see "research and build a room". And you have no idea that this is smallest, simplest part of the quest. Meanwhile, those 90 days are meant for entire thing. Who came up with such dumb idea?

So...

At this point, The Crust is "curse and restart until you get it about right" simulator. And that's sad, the game looks like an indie game at every angle, except the one when you actually try it. As a side note, it's criminal that there's no dedicated autosave after initial intro part. NOBODY wants to play it through again, what the hell. This day and age, nobody's going to invest 5-something hours into a game just to be told "you did it wrong".

There's also just bad code; miner units, for example. Early on, I noticed that mining robots don't really care about how close they are to mining tasks, and thus, if you mark a long wall to be mined, expect your miner to walk forth and back all along the wall, picking tiles to dig totally at random. In a game about mining crust of Moon, this is criminally lazy. Imagine painting a wall, but after every stroke of the brush, walk random number of steps left or right. Even worse if you're trying to excavate a long tunnel with accessible ends: workers might easily dig a bit on one end, go all around to dig on other end, then another one again...

What is this?? Why is this?

I will absolutely remember to change my rating if balance will be fixed. And that'd better be a HEAVY fix. But at this point, it's an exercise in frustration. I don't mind difficult games, but I absolutely despise unfair ones. Why are soft-locks even a thing in 2024? Is this a Sierra adventure game from 1989? How hard is it to make Rover randomly find material caches (without needing a damn Expedition Center!!!) or put some regular aid shipments or whatever into game, as option? How hard is it to make sure ALL veins spawn next to elevator (including the damned Aluminum which has ended my game, THRICE). How hard is it to give at least guaranteed 100 of basic research of every kind to ensure players still have a fighting chance?

Not very. But it's not done, or probably even being thought about. I get that making a game makes you try same game 50 times a day and you'll eventually get REALLY good at it, but that's what testers are for. Grab a random bloke from the street and make them play. You'll see quite a different picture of your game. Paying. Customers. Are. Not. Testers. Not even for early access. Testers are meant to get paid, not paying themselves to get waste bunch of hours on unfinishable and unfinished game.

The time i have on this game is me restarting the Campaign 5 times already, i don't usually give a negative review to Early Access games due to bugs but it's the first time i see so many game breaking bugs/crashes on the first couple of hours of gameplay.

Apparently the game had a lot of testing but for what purpose i don't know since not much has been fixed.

Going to try to play a few more times but i don't have much hope.

Edit: Right after posting this review i tried to launch the game but now after the latest update it doesn't even launch anymore, yeah i give up, will check again after 1.0